Blackburn Leads Bipartisan Colleagues in Demanding Answers from Meta Following Bombshell Whistleblower Allegations

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, led a group of bipartisan colleagues demanding Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg provide all internal research regarding the safety risks and prevalence of users under the age of 13 on its platforms, its policies and procedures to review research proposals and reports of child exploitation, and the use and effectiveness of parental tools. This follows the explosive hearing Senator Blackburn led last week, where whistleblowers testified that Meta buried child safety research.

Meta Allegedly Censored, Blocked, and Deleted Child Safety Research to Turn a Profit

"On September 8th, 2025, six whistleblowers focused on youth wellbeing and other safety issues went public with allegations that Meta had censored, blocked, and even required the deletion of research into the prevalence and underlying causes of harms to young people on its platforms, including within its Reality Labs (virtual reality) division. According to documents provided to our offices, Meta has straightjacketed its staff under a 'Social Issues Protocol' that requires advanced and additional review of research that covers matters such as human trafficking, suicide, eating disorders, bullying, and child trafficking. In practice, those researchers found that Meta installed monitors from their legal department that routinely altered, blocked, and shutdown work on teen safety, limited internal access to information, circumvented normal review processes, used attorney-client privilege to conceal research, and even required the destruction of data. This willful blindness, according to one whistleblower, meant a 'variety of topics going un-researched, including what kinds of harms youth were experiencing in VR (i.e. bullying, grooming, body image)' and that internal experts 'could only support 'non-sensitive' topics…' When asked for the reasons for the denial, Meta's legal staff reportedly cited 'regulatory concerns' and reputational risk, such as the company's effort to avoid actual knowledge of children using the platform and the toxic effects of the platform on young people."

Meta Rushed to Market Virtual Reality Products to Children Despite Safety Concerns

"The whistleblowers' allegations focus on Meta's near-obsessive attempts to push its virtual reality products from Reality Labs onto young teens and even children, demonstrating that its 'move fast and break things' motto still sacrifices the wellbeing of young people in favor of profit. By 2022, Meta executives, tasked with increasing engagement, had made the decision to expand access to its VR headsets (Quest) to children (10-13, an effort dubbed 'Project Salsa') and open access to teens for its VR social media platform (Horizon Worlds). According to the whistleblowers, this decision happened before any meaningful research on the potential dangers had occurred (beyond mere studies on the physical safety of wearing the headset) and despite deep concerns from internal experts that VR might be inherently more dangerous than already dangerous and harmful traditional social media products. As one Meta employee wrote in an internal post, the 'more immersive an experience is, the more challenging users may find it to distinguish between VR and non-VR realities-younger users in particular.' As one whistleblower later wrote, when parents are already 'concerned about ten year olds being so immersed in social media that they socially withdraw and have difficulty prioritizing and understanding real life over their virtual one, imagine how much worse it can be when they're totally immersed in that virtual world.'

Whistleblowers Say Meta Turned a Blind Eye to Reports of Rampant Abuse Against Children in Virtual Reality

"Blocked by Meta legal staff from much-needed, direct research on the prevalence and impact of virtual reality and potential harms to children, the whistleblowers sought to gather data from outside traditional channels. What they learned was alarming, finding stories and reports of: rampant bullying within VR (Children bullying adults; adults bullying children; children bullying other children.); children experiencing and participating in hate speech (i.e. users saying 'Your [sic] black you have no rights'); pedophilic acts, including adults virtually simulating child rape (i.e. users saying 'Thanks meta for making this the pedophile kingdom'); children sharing personally identifying information with strangers (i.e. home address); grooming; children willingly simulating sexual acts with each other and with adults; children being exposed to adult culture, including drugs, violence, and vulgar language. Using reviews within Meta's Quest app store as one channel, they found Meta's Horizon platform had the highest number of complaints within app store reviews regarding underage users, sexual violence, gambling, and pedophilia. The researchers frequently heard kids and parents share stories about those same abuses during focus groups and surveys. According to the whistleblowers, these reports were excised and deleted, and outcomes were altered to paint a more positive impression of Meta's VR products, even within internal research."

Meta Misrepresents Effectiveness of Parental Control Tools While Lobbying Congress to Block Legislation to Protect Children

"Instead, Meta executives-according to the whistleblowers-believed that responsibility for protecting young users should fall solely onto parents and other VR app developers. This decision was made despite Meta knowing their parental control tools were often ineffective and unused. Meta's own researchers found that parents were not aware of their existence. On Instagram, in one survey that 2% of parents had turned them on. When they were able to conduct surveys with parents, researchers in Reality Labs found 'parents were neither prepared to meaningfully use the VR parental controls, nor likely to use them often, and that the controls alone were insufficient to keep teens safe.' The reasons for this failure included the fact that a substantial number of young people-more than half of teens-appear to lie about their age, that parents have a more difficult time monitoring VR compared to phones, and that Meta had not been able to make use of age data from other Meta platforms in VR. These parental tools also suffered from little to no research on their effectiveness prior to release… Parental controls, instead of being the solution for Meta's rampant dangers-as they had been branded to both parents and to Congress-appear to be ineffective and underutilized. Meta's effort to offload responsibility from itself to parents is no substitute for safety by design. Altogether, Meta appears to have walked away from-and even obstructed-research into and remedies for the toxic impacts of its products, while misrepresenting the effectiveness of its efforts and lobbying against legislation that would legally require such precautions."

CO-SIGNERS

The letter is also signed by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ashley Moody (R-Fla.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-La.), and Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

Click here to read the full letter.

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https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/2025/9/technology/blackburn-leads-bipartisan-colleagues-in-demanding-answers-from-meta-following-bombshell-whistleblower-allegations